Digital video camera / MP3 player hybrid has balls

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Have you ever wanted a tiny digital video camera, that’s about the size of a ping-pong ball, with built in MP3 player? No, me neither, but that doesn’t seem to have stopped the DVR Camball getting through the focus groups.

It’s a brave device. Perhaps something a film maker might call “avante-garde”, and what the rest of us would call “weird”. And for some reason they decided to make it spherical too.

Apparently the gimmick is that you wear it around your neck to “lifecast” your, er, life, which goes some way to explaining the unusual marriage of devices. Whilst I am the sort of person who puts far too much of his life on the internet though – I use Twitter obsessively – I’ll be damned if I’m going to spend my evenings editing video highlights of my day together for no one to care about.

Spec-wise, the camera is actually “quite good”. It runs off of easily replenished SD cards, and records at 320×240 at 30fps to MP4… so about as good as the average digital stills camera with a movie mode. It also boasts TV out and USB connectivity for downloading videos… and, er, uploading music I guess.

I can’t understand the Korean spec-sheet very well, as it’s full of these incomprehensible characters, but if they could give it a recording buffer of, say, two minutes, where you can press record and get the previous two minutes of what the camera has seen too (for capturing unexpected events like car crashes or old people falling over, and other YouTube fodder), they could be on to a winner. Maybe.